


May He Rest in Peace

by coffee_mage



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Steve Feels, TW: dysphoria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-12-04 10:56:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffee_mage/pseuds/coffee_mage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve has a morning routine.  There's one part that he absolutely hates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	May He Rest in Peace

Every morning, Steve Rogers gets up and goes jogging.  He takes a different route each and every day, seeing parts of the city he never imagined would exist when he left for the war.  There are marvels here that didn’t exist outside of comic books, when he first walked these streets, and he’s always shocked when he jogs back towards the Tower and realizes that he’s living in one of them.

After he jogs, Steve strips off his sweaty jogging clothes and puts them in a laundry chute.  Twice a week, clean laundry appears in a basket just inside the front door of his suite.  He learned about this system his third week in the tower when Tony demanded to know why Steve hadn’t been sending his laundry.  Up until that point, Steve had simply been washing his things in the sink and hanging them over his shower curtain rod to dry.  When the system of mechanized beings that seemed to live in the basement had been explained to him, he’d been flabbergasted.  So much work to create something to do such a simple task?  Still, Tony insisted that his laundry bots were getting bored and he’d promised them Captain America would start sending his things down, so Steve dutifully sent his laundry down the chute.

From there, he quickly jumps in the shower and turns it up super hot, sending up pillars of steam above his shower curtain.  He scrubs down quickly, efficiently.  He keeps seeing stories in the news about there not being much clean water left in the world, so he doesn’t want to waste what there is, but he also knows that after a good brisk jog, he can get a little stinky and, while the smell of human beings doesn’t bother him, everyone in this new age seems to be obsessed with covering their own scents with those of artificial flowers and fruits.  Sure, they had scented soaps in his day for ladies, but now there are scented lotions, foot scrubs, face scrubs, shampoos, perfumes, colognes, body sprays, conditioners and Lord knows what else.  And everyone seems to use all of them, in a desperate attempt to cover up their own humanity.  Everyone seems on a collision course with becoming one with computers and no one seems to mind.  Tony, for one, seems to be upset it’s not happening fast enough.

 After he turns the shower off, he steels himself and gets out, wrapping a towel securely around his waist.  This is the part of his day he hates.  Shaving.  It isn’t the unfamiliar blades that bother him.  It isn’t the strangely scented shaving cream.  In an aerosol can.  No brush, no soap, no mug.  Strange, but no, it didn’t bother him.  It was the mirror.  

Steve Rogers was good at many things, but any time he tried to shave without looking in a mirror, he came out looking like he’d gone three rounds with a barbed wire fence and lost.  The mirror wasn’t optional, not when your mother had taught you to shave at the bathroom sink when her health was dwindling and she hadn’t really known what to do.

 Without the mirror, it was easier to pretend that he wasn’t so big.  He could slip around the Tower on quiet feet, unobserved, and not feel so huge and out of place.  As long as he didn’t look down at himself, and he’d gotten quite good at that, he felt normal.

 But the mirror showed the truth.  Steve Rogers died in Brooklyn, when vitarays, whatever those were, had slammed into his body, causing the most intense pain he had ever felt in his life.  The man who had emerged was Captain America, who sometimes shared a name with Steve Rogers and perhaps a soul, but no one would ever look at Captain America and see Steve Rogers.  And somehow, when they’d killed Steve and brought Captain America into being, they’d forgotten to give him a new mind.  They'd celebrated for those precious few moments when Dr. Erskine had gotten to see his creation brought to life.

The problem was, they really should have been saying a eulogy for the man who had walked into the machine.

 It was always a shock, every time, when he caught himself in the mirror like this.  He’d tried dressing before he shaved, but that ended in team members smirking as they rubbed bits of shaving cream off of him with their thumbs and comments about Cap not being good at everything.  He hated it when they touched him, entering his space, touching parts of him that should not be where they were.  His shoulders, too far apart, too far from his ears, his neck too long, his back too broad.  As long as he didn’t really touch anything, he could pretend he was still him.

 This body hadn’t bothered him in the war, really.  He had been trying to serve his country, save lives, fight a greater evil and move his country forward.  The only times he’d ever had time to be bothered by it were when he was touring with the girls and, then, he had chalked it up to his frustrations at being held back like a dancing monkey, not being allowed to serve.  Once he’d given up touring and become a real soldier, he’d been grateful for it.

 It hadn’t occurred to him, however, that the war would end and his body wouldn’t.

 And now here he was, seventy years out of his own time, in a body that didn’t feel like home.  And every morning, he had to shave.  Every morning he had to see himself in the mirror.  The rest of the day, he could avoid the mirror, didn’t need to look, but right then, when he shaved, he had to look.  And what he saw disgusted him in ways he had never imagined he would be by any healthy body, let alone by his own.  It wasn’t that it was ugly.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t that it was painful.  Once the vitarays had ended, the pain had stopped and he was in fine shape now.  It wasn’t that it didn’t fit his aesthetic of what a good men’s body looked like.  It was very symmetrical, well built, firm, healthy.

 It just wasn’t his body.  And every morning, for a few minutes, Steve Rogers looked out of Captain America’s eyes and missed Steve Rogers so intensely he always wondered if it was going to make him throw up.


End file.
